Question to instigate a new security comic: how comes that everybody in software rejects security through obscurity, but not in hardware? I'm not sure what the issue is. Are you suggesting that something like a router might be shipped with a hardcoded admin password? And since the software in quest...

This is how modern Jewish religious time works as well. It was critical to medieval monks (and for all I know, modern ones as well). Prayers are required at roman hours, which made clock inventions both critical (the monk's souls depended on time keeping) and difficult (because the length of time k...

Interesting to see that Rolle didn't even belive in differential calculus when he proved this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolle%27s_theorem#History Interesting. I assumed that it was a corollary to the Mean Value Theorem. Note: I only remember the Mean Value Theorem as it was an equally blinding...

Whats the point of a party-identifying senator who only votes with the party 50% or 60%? Wait, what? Did Susan Collins [60%] die? John McCain was 87% (median GOP 91%). https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-john-mccains-death-means-for-the-senate/ [nifty graph showing the whole Senate] https://w...

Most businesses are between 1-19 employees in the US. They do not have a dedicated IT guy. If they're extremely lucky, one of their hires is an IT guy who can handle most issues. More than likely, they contract out to an IT company that provides support for these businesses. [deletia] There's a ten...

Given this is (presumedly) the US, those weird local sales taxes you have (and the even weirder final figure) must already be in the initial value (minus the things previously normally paid for by semi-involuntary participation in data-scraping anyway , giving $20.45?)… It gets worse when you are j...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44402948 more information http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-gttf-jenkins-taylor-sentencing-20180606-story.html Note that the lead officer was considered "untouchable" for his corruption, so presumably his protectors and kickba...

(Who is South-African, whoever it is who doesn't realise that. Geoff Bezos is American, as is Burt Rutan (though I think Richard Branson, the Brit is currently "the money", and there's other people above Rutan in the structure these days). It's a non-zero countable list, but I leave it up...

Yeah, but at least their news didn't consist of Twitter reactions. I'm not sure when it happened, but by the 1990s it was considered improper to report actual facts. You had to present both "sides" (even for things like flat Earth vs. oblate spheroid) and do so largely via quotes. Using T...

The original prognosis was for 2030, but we are currently below the 50% curve with four living moon men. Not much. Follow it up to "4 left" and you the 50 percentile is before 2020. The "5th percentile" is way down by 2015. So while it does look a bit below 50%, it isn't by much...

Your logic boils down to expecting people to prioritize the same things as you, when that's definitely not the case in reality. Folks are accepting Trump as the option closest to their interests. Sort of. Trump still doesn't have an amazing popularity rating. By the numbers, people don't really act...

Society changes rapidly. It was only 14 years ago where a white man could sexually assault a black woman on live tv and the entire media would blame her , literally blaming it on what she was wearing. "Wardrobe malfunction"? Really? I'm pretty sure that was a scripted event, and unlikely ...

Anyone assuming the trustworthiness of newspapers in the paper age should look up the shenanigans of H.L. Mencken and William Randalf Hurst. Mencken described in detail the invention of news at the local level: hearing rumors in a bar, making up the details, and for the important part: sharing it wi...

In case you are wondering what happened, the power rating on the devices are designed to draw 800W or 1000W from 120VAC (assuming US power sources, I don't know if True Value stores are common outside the US). The catch is that extension cord knocked the voltage down a bit, so they weren't heating n...

So, I just took "Space Law" at CUA Law school. While you have ample violations of the FAA, FCC, ITU and DOD rules. To violate EVERY regulator of Satellites that I know of, you need: *A violation of the Outer Space Treaty - A nuke or WMD will do. *A violation of the NOAA rules - any earth ...

A factor of 10 assumes that either the drivers aren't tailgating (which likely only happens in places that *don't* need more roads) or the computer simply has *zero* spacing between cars. A factor of 3 to 5 seems possible, although how you would be certain that a human didn't slip into your convoy ...

Nearly all traffic is caused either by poor human driving habits, or by accidents. We could handle 10 times the number of cars if they were driven by computer systems. Huge [citation needed] on that figure. I accept that the number of cars could increase a bit if all of them were connected and comp...

Comparing cars across 30 years of development is going to get you some odd results. Your Prius almost certainly has more horsepower than what passed for a Dodge Charger in 1985. Those old '80s Civics gave you anywhere from 55 to around 80 hp. There are very few cars that are underpowered nowadays f...

Some thoughts: Do ultralights still not require a license (and thus age)? The first death in my high school class (@16) died this way... Pierre Currie died in a horse carriage accident. Presumably these were not unknown. Then there was chariot racing that was presumably entertainment similar to glad...

harmless.sh What if you have to make a derivative of the code? Would it be "Mostly Harmless?" I'm trying to decide if that file is required to have a "goto" in it, or if it's required not to. I think the requirement is to use goto, but have rules to make it "safe". Lik...

The Potomac river is the border of Maryland and Virginia, with the curious property that the entire river is part of Maryland. As far as I know, the only real difference is that you could have a building on the Virginia shore that sold VA lottery tickets, and also have a cash register on a floating ...

I think the fundamental problem is claiming that anything possible in a hard sci fi universe is magick and not technology. What are you supposed to do, summon Maxwell's demon? In the introduction to "Recluse Tales" (a bunch of short stories revisiting a 20 year+ old series), L. E. Modesitt...

There's a thread over on realworldtech.com that has a lot of pros and cons of used enterprise SSDs (Linus mentions how consumer ones have a non-zero chance of losing all data if you lose power at the wrong time). Can't say I'm sold. I've been more curious out refurbished rotating drives. While the &...

Nearly 1000 people were killed by police last year. 68 were unarmed. So 7% of the time a police officer decides to shoot someone to death, that person is unarmed... Given the number of police who plant weapons on people they’ve shot as well as the utter lack of any sort of consistent reporting - or...

Languages are tools, not pets. Use the right tool for the right job. As awesome as rust's safety guarantees are, sometimes a bash one-liner is all you need. So far, every language I met had *some* use case where it shines, and *some* use case where it's a poor choice. True, so we should probably me...

I think this, like rowhammer, shows mostly that we are getting sufficiently good at software security that attackers have to exploit the hardware. Actually, Heartbleed is only about 2 months older than rowhammer. Who needs hardware exploits when you only have to press backspace 28 times? Show me a ...

get a good 100 or 200 amps extra than your total (power distribution unit) What? I think you mean milli amps. My entire house's electrical supply is protected by a 60amp fuse. I think he means Watts. Even so, power is [instantaneous] voltage * [instantaneous] current. So >100 Amps going into a <1.0...

I don't remember that editor at all (I wrote nearly all my BASIC on 8-bit Ataris, and mostly wrote Visual Basic much later on PCs). Presumably it was part of BASICA (or possibly QuickBasic, although I think QuickBasic had a "later DOSish" interface). I *did* use an editor presumably inspir...

You do know about https://pcpartpicker.com/ don't you, it makes finding a good build vastly easier. Video card: Titan V is only the answer if you really care about machine learning or double precision CUDA work. If you do it is a "great bargain" (compared to its meager/exhorbinant competit...

I'm not sure this is the right place to ask, but it's my best bet. Recently I made the mistake of measuring AC current with a multimeter only capable of measuring DC current (Voltcraft VC130-1). Since then the resistance measuements are all wrong and the diode tester beeps continuously even if I re...

The title text seems a bit odd. While plenty of breeders will immediately retire a horse to stud after winning a Kentucky Derby (the recent triple crown winner had already sold stud rights, so the owner had no reason to retire the horse early), you still should put Missouri Horse Hole before the Bel...

DnD rules don't have any spells for it because Decipher Script is just a skill check. So basically it's unsupported by magic, beyond stacking Int bonuses. As a DM I'd probably have the creator take 20 on making it to set the DC, then give a cracker one check per workday or something, with reduction...

Could you limit this to just one thread and not do what "Maximum77" did on this site: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?62-Mad-Science-and-Grumpy-Technology To those who missed it, OOTS is the "other great stick figure comic" on the internet. It might not have any o...

Say you are advising this evil lich queen one day and she requests an improved system of encryption as part of her overarching plan to stop all opposition. In what scenario would spies need better encryption rather than steganography? I thought spying was all about passing information unbeknownst t...

The premise of #1918 is absurd except that the 15th anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom is coming up, when this really happened. The French were too stupide to join Bush 43's invasion of Iraq. By March 2003, there was a de facto boycott of products that sounded French but weren't: https://news.v...

to let you know that you are looking at the real account of a famous person and not a parody account. Whether or not that was their intention at the time, the implementation doesn't reflect that. The badge system, in practice, would verify that the owner of the account was the same person as the ow...